


wait (there's something else here)

by canistakahari



Series: Halloween [1]
Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Ghosts, Haunting, Implied Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-26
Updated: 2012-09-26
Packaged: 2017-11-15 02:42:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/522258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canistakahari/pseuds/canistakahari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim is hearing and seeing things that shouldn’t be seen or heard. (Halloween 2010)</p>
            </blockquote>





	wait (there's something else here)

**Author's Note:**

> Title and lyrics from The Birthday Massacre's "Lovers End".

_take just one last dare  
pretend you don’t care   
till twilight falls  
  
wait  
  
...there’s something else here—_  
  
***  
  
It’s only a single-room occupancy in a rundown three-story building on the edge of town, but it’s Jim’s, and he’s not sleeping in the loft of the barn anymore, so it’s basically the Shangri-fucking-la as far as he’s concerned  
  
On the first day, he cleans his new bedroom from floor to ceiling, a bandanna wrapped around his mouth and nose to keep out the metric ton of dust that keeps exploding into the filmy air like fun-sized mushroom clouds of allergy-inducing death whenever he moves a piece of furniture or has the gall to step on a loose bit of floorboard.   
  
The building is sleepy and quiet, an old, dark little structure with twisting corridors, creaky stairs, and light bulbs that make loud noises and burn out the moment Jim turns them on. The landlady is small and withered, with large coke-bottle glasses and dentures that suction out of her mouth when she says words with the letter ‘p’ in them. Jim thinks her name is Mrs. Morris.  
  
Jim goes to sleep on a mattress on the floor, his bed in pieces back in his mom’s house in Riverside, and wakes up sometime in that midnight dreamland of subconscious hallucination.   
  
The kitchen is up the hallway and down the winding stairs, and while Jim is not easily frightened (having spent years of his life up at odd hours and wandering dark, empty places on his own), but he still acknowledges this place is  _creepy_  in the indefinable, cloying way of squeaking floorboards and dark corners in the chill of a badly-heated building. It’s dim, and all the bulbs that don’t burn out immediately just don’t work at all. When he reaches the kitchen, it’s fucking freezing. The cold presses in, oppressive and demanding.   
  
He bends to reach into the tiny, rattling fridge and when he turns around, there’s a man at the table.   
  
The can of pop drops out of Jim’s hands like a brick and he startles, a chill running through him from head to toe, his spine tingling.   
  
“Jesus,” he says, scrubbing a hand through his hair sheepishly. “What are you, a ninja? I’m Jim. I’ve got the room on the landing.”  
  
The man doesn’t look up.  
  
“Hey,” says Jim, annoyed. “Did you hear me, dude?”  
  
The man finally raises his head, but he still doesn’t look at Jim, instead glancing in evident confusion from left to right and then over his shoulder at the entry-way into the kitchen.   
  
“Hey!” shouts Jim, “I’m  _right here_ , what the fuck is wrong with you?”  
  
Overhead, the light bulb pops and crackles, momentarily brightening the room—and in the sudden flare of light everything looks a whole lot less run-down, grey walls turning to warm cream, dust disappearing, imperfections mending themselves—before the bulb abruptly goes out, plunging the kitchen into darkness.  
  
When it flickers back on a second later, the man is gone.  
  
What the  _fuck_.  
  


oOo

  
  
Jim doesn’t immediately jump to conclusions. He’s pretty proud of himself for that, actually.  
  
He just walks back to his room in a daze, very calmly shuts the door, barricades it with everything he owns, and then crawls under the covers of his mattress and pulls them deliberately over his head like he’s a little boy.   
  
For the rest of the night, he thinks he hears things.   
  
Low voices, snatches of conversation—mostly a man’s deep drawl and occasionally what sounds like the high, childish voice of a little girl. He hears water in the pipes, the scrape of furniture, footsteps. Eventually, he falls asleep around dawn, curled into a tight shivering ball, and when he wakes with a start in what appears to be late afternoon judging by the quality of the light seeping in through the filthy window, the house is utterly silent.   
  
In the warm light of day, it’s easier to dismiss the events of the night and early morning.   
  
Jim untangles himself from his sheets, sits up, and listens.  
  
Then he laughs, the sound coming out of him kind of strained and reedy and lacking in any type of humour, so loud in the lull that he startles himself.  
  
“Jesus Christ,” he whispers, rubbing a hand over his face.   
  
A hand which he very stubbornly denies is shaking. It’s  _not_.  
  


oOo

  
  
The kitchen is quiet and blessedly empty when Jim finally works up the nerve to leave his room.   
  
Sunlight dribbles in through the mildew-stained window, weak and tinged with grey, but even that small amount of brightness and warmth is enough to further push the night’s occurrences out of Jim’s mind.   
  
It seems silly, now, standing in the quiet kitchen, that there was a man sitting at this table.   
  
Jim stares at the empty chair and then makes himself brush through the air just above the cracked, split wood, very carefully not touching it.  
  
When he looks up at the ceiling above the table, his stomach goes cold.  
  
The kitchen light bulb is brand new.  
  


oOo

  
  
That night, there’s a little girl standing at the end of the hallway wearing a purple party dress, her brown hair tied in careful plaits.  
  
Jim doesn’t sleep.  
  


oOo

  
  
Three nights later, Jim dreams of a tall, three-story house full of light, all hardwood floors and bright, open space. It’s full of squashy, cozy chairs, thick rugs, paintings and photos on the walls. There are toys all over, on the stairs and spread on the floor, tripping Jim as he wanders this bright happy place, picking up a Barbie doll and a red plastic fire truck.   
  
“Jo, I thought I told you—at least pick up the toys on the goddamn stairs. You want your poor old man to break his fool neck?”  
  
The voice is pleasantly deep, with a hint of drawl. Jim follows it, but the corridor just stretches on, the conversation never getting any closer.   
  
“Sorry, daddy. I’ll pick ‘em up when I’m done, promise.”  
  
“Why’s your GI Joe in the fireplace, baby doll?”  
  
“Barbie’s rescuing him from the dragon, see?”  
  
“Uh huh, I do. Want some help?”  
  
“You can fly the plane.”  
  
“There’s a plane?”  
  
It’s like tunnel-vision, Jim thinks. He’s emerging from a long, dark tunnel, into a cheery living room. In the distance, sitting in front of the hearth, he can see a tall, dark-haired man sitting on the carpet with a small girl. There’s a plastic horse in her hands, and he’s holding a model airplane. Heads bent together, she narrates the story and he obediently acts it out, asking questions and adding dialogue or telling jokes when necessary.   
  
Jim is frozen.   
  
It’s the man from his breakfast table, and the little girl in the lime green t-shirt and yellow shorts was in his hallway.   
  
Jim wakes up shivering, sick with emotion and choked with tears, his heart thundering in his chest, beating so loud is fills the room. The blankets are shoved to the bottom of the mattress, wrapped around his ankles, and his skin is cold and clammy.  
  
He spends the rest of the night shaking under the covers, trying to ignore the muffled voices floating up through the floorboards that have followed him out of his fucking dream.   
  


oOo

  
  
The bathroom is the approximate size and shape of a shoebox.   
  
There’s no bathtub or shower, just a drain in one corner surrounded on three sides by a raised lip of tile flooring and a shower head that juts out from the wall at just over head height. The entire space smells like mildew and worse, and it’s the only room in the place besides his bedroom that Jim actively attempts to clean.   
  
Whether or not he actually succeeds at that is up for debate, but he does  _try_. When he can’t find a shower curtain, he ends up just wearing flip-flops and removing anything remotely soluble or absorbent from the immediate vicinity of the spray of water, turning the entire bathroom into a shower.   
  
He’s scrubbing the mirror when he sees it.   
  
The first time he’d entered the bathroom he hadn’t even realized it was a mirror. It was so caked with god knows what that it had turned matte grey and not at all reflective; it takes an entire bottle of Windex to wipe it down to something dingy and functional.   
  
Then the sponge slips out of his bright yellow rubber-gloved hands. He ducks to snatch it up from the sink, and when he raises his head and meets the gaze of his reflection he yelps aloud and throws himself back against the wall because the face in the mirror is  _not his own_.   
  
Shocked hazel eyes are staring out at him from a round, pale face, dark-haired and scruffy. A hand reaches out, as if to wipe at the mirror or maybe even come through the fucking thing, whatever, Jim doesn’t wait to find out. He trips over the pile of toilet paper stacked up by the toilet, hits his head on the towel rack, and stumbles out the door, running all the way back to his bedroom before throwing himself at the mattress and pulling the sheets up over his head.   
  
He doesn’t stop shaking for an hour.   
  


oOo

  
  
“Tall, like—about six foot, my height, with dark brown hair,” says Jim, scrubbing his fingers through the growth of beard on his chin as he stares wild-eyed at the landlady.  
  
Mrs. Morris blinks at him. “Who are you again, son?” she demands, adjusting her glasses. “My mind just isn’t what it used to be, you know.”  
  
“Jim,” he says in half-panicked exasperation. “ _Jim_ , I’ve got the room on the landing. I just saw you last week.”  
  
“Oh, of course, dear,” she says, slipping off her glasses and cleaning them on the hem of her skirt.   
  
“Mrs. Morris, I’m trying to tell you your fucking house is  _haunted_ ,” snaps Jim. “Do you understand me? There’s a man, and his—his daughter, I hear them at night, I’ve  _seen_  them, too. I thought it was a just a creepy house at first, but I  _keep seeing them_.”  
  
“Were you always blond, sweetheart?” she asks, apropos of nothing.  
  
“It’s natural, if that’s what you mean,” blurts Jim in dumb surprise.   
  
The tiny woman squints through her glasses, then shakes her head. “You sure? Wasn’t brown?”  
  
“No,” says Jim firmly. “Have you heard a word I’ve said? No? Purple monkey dishwater?”  
  
“Do you like pie, Leonard? I’ll bring you and your little girl a pie, honey,” she says, nodding as she shuffles off down the hallway.  
  
“My name is  _Jim_ ,” he yells after her. “And I was telling  _you_  about a little girl, I didn’t say I  _had_  one!”  
  


oOo

  
  
For two days, Jim glances over his shoulder, strains his ears for conversation, avoids looking in mirrors, and doesn’t leave his bedroom after dark, but he doesn’t see the dark-haired man or the little girl.   
  
He almost lets himself relax, lets himself entertain the idea that maybe this was all just a stupid joke, that maybe his crazy little landlady was hazing her new tenant in some bizarre, totally inappropriate way.   
  
Then he wakes up one night because—well, it takes him a few seconds to really realize  _why_ , which is because the heating must be off and it’s  _so fucking cold_  he can actually see his breath in front of him, icy white and steamy. He shudders, wrapping his blankets around his body more tightly, but the chill still penetrates, tickling up his spine in a sensation too similar to the touch of ghostly fingers, so he sits up.   
  
“Fuck,” he whispers, rubbing his eyes. He doesn’t want to leave his bedroom, doesn’t want to step foot outside it because here he’s  _safe_ , here he may be able to hear the voices but the ghosts never actually _appear_ , never come near this room. There’s music, tonight, drifting up slow and out of tune through the stupid fucking defective heating vent. Jim pulls his legs up, cocoons himself in blankets, and presses his face to his knees.   
  
Very slowly, keeping his blankets wrapped around him like a shield, Jim gets to his feet and pushes his door open.   
  
The hallway is empty.   
  
He makes sure of that by waiting nearly five minutes for any unwanted guests to appear before padding out.  
  
There’s a linen closet at the end of the corridor.   
  
Jim swallows hard, steels himself, and tries to ignore how loud his footsteps seem on the creaky, warped floorboards. He makes it to the linen closet, filling his arms with as many blankets as he can carry, before turning around.   
  
 _Right there_.   
  
At the end of the hallway, at the top of the stairs, the man stands holding the little girl’s hand in his.  
  
Jim’s heart lodges in his throat and he goes absolutely still, hugging the blankets as panic swims up inside him.   
  
They look like a faded photograph, flickering and solidifying slightly the longer Jim stares.   
  
“You see, daddy,” says the girl in a loud stage whisper, her voice dripping with  _I told you so_. “There  _is_  a man. You can see him too, right? Don’t you dare say you can’t or I’ll stomp your foot.”  
  
“Yeah, baby, I see him too,” says the man, his dark eyes wide with horror. “You run along back downstairs, Joanna.”  
  
“But daddy—”  
  
“ _Joanna Mae_.”  
  
The little girl sighs in evident disappointment and slips away, leaving Jim to have a standoff with a  _fucking ghost_.   
  
“Stay there,” says Jim, with no idea of whether the man can hear him as well as see him. He hadn’t been able to hear him that first time in the kitchen. Maybe he’s getting stronger, or something. Gaining visibility. “Just—don’t,” he blurts, fear coursing through him like white-capped rapids, flooding his synapses. He shuts his eyes despite himself, and something pops and sizzles overhead, plunging his end of the hallway into thick darkness—did  _another_  fucking bulb blow?!—and Jim doesn’t care how much of a child it makes him, he throws the blankets over his head and barrels down the corridor, the floor ice-cold beneath his bare feet, skidding to a stop in front of his bedroom.   
  
He slams the door, falling against it, breath rasping through him.   
  
 _Safe_.   
  
He makes a nest of blankets and shivers and shivers and shivers and doesn’t dare emerge until the sun is high in the sky.  
  


oOo

  
  
He dreams of a cold so bone-deep and crushing that it freezes his joints and seals his eyes and lips shut and steals his breath; his words are trapped, stolen, body paralyzed as his nerves burn and crystals of ice fill his veins and drown his organs. It’s a cold so penetrating that he can’t even shiver, can’t even think about moving, blanketed by a choking miasma of fear and icy chill. His lungs burn, demanding oxygen, as panic fills him.  
  
He dies and dies and dies a thousand times over, alert and aware as his life is drained by the cold and robbed from him.  
  
Jim screams, silent and frozen.  
  
Jim  _screams_ —  
  
When he starts awake, his blankets are wrapped around his throat and he’s gasping in a puddle of his own cool and drying sweat, heart pounding so hard against his sternum that he thinks he might never calm down.   
  
The cold clings to him like the press of fingers and lips, his skin prickling.   
  
Shuddering, Jim covers his face with his hands and shoves the heels of his palms into his eyes until pastel blue and red lights burst in his vision.  
  
 _Fuck_.  
  


oOo

  
  
There’s a half-eaten apple pie sitting in the middle of the kitchen table.  
  
Jim can’t bring himself to touch it, hell, he can barely even  _look_  at it, eyeing it instead from his peripheral vision.  
  
He knows where it came from—he’d seen his landlady earlier, and she’d winked at him from behind her glasses—but he  _hasn’t had any yet_  and none of the stories he ever heard as a kid talked about ghosts _stealing food_.  
  
The ghosts themselves would almost be okay roommates, if they didn’t scare the shit out of him. It’s not even like they do horrifying things, or look rotted and grotesque. They barely seem to realize he’s there most of the time, and their soft conversations generally have nothing to do with him. The man talks to his daughter about schoolwork, her friends, tells her fairy tales and anecdotes—plays with her and rattles around in the kitchen and wanders the main floor in the evenings. His footsteps are steady and sedate, while the girl’s are light and quick.   
  
It’s the dreams that get him.  
  
He always dreams, after he sees them.   
  
Dreams of what this house probably looked like when they were still alive, before it was converted to single-rooms and fell into the abysmal state of disrepair it’s in now. Those particular dreams always turn sinister when Jim wanders, unerringly, into the guest room—the room he’s figured out is the one he sleeps in now. That’s when the dreams change shape, when the temperature plummets, when the cold creeps in and smothers him, deep and chilling and terrifyingly inescapable.  
  
Jim always thought that if you die in dreams, you die in real life.  
  
He’s privately afraid one day the cold of his dreams will claim him before he wakes.   
  
He’s just— _afraid_.  
  


oOo

  
  
When he works up the nerve to spare himself a glance in the mirror, the hair on the back of Jim’s neck rises.   
  
There’s nothing but his own face, pale and wan, but he looks like reheated shit. Dark circles under his eyes, waxy translucent skin, chapped lips, and glassy eyes.   
  
He can almost see  _through_  himself.   
  
Can almost see the door behind him through his own fucking skull.   
  
When he gets his trembling hands under control, Jim strips out of his clothes and showers for nearly an hour, until the hot water runs ice cold and he gasps and throws himself out from under the spray in a wild panic, his heart shuddering arrhythmically.   
  
It feels too much like his dream.   
  
 _He needs to get the fuck out of here_.  
  


oOo

  
  
“I heard water running again,” says the ghost.  
  
Jim sits wide-eyed at the top of the stairs, watching him through the slats of the banister. He looks solid, distressingly solid, just as solid as Mrs. Morris, who’s standing in the front door foyer and  _talking to the ghost_.   
  
Jim’s heart is in his throat and he can’t move.   
  
“For nearly an hour. Every time I checked the upstairs bathroom, it was empty, quiet. But I swear, Mrs. Morris, this is getting out of hand,” the man says, running his hand through his mussed brown hair. His other hand is on his hip and his shoulders are tensed, bowed with stress. “It’s actually freaking Jo out less than it is me, but it keeps her up at night, like it’s a game. She’s tired in school, always talks about this—this ghost. This young man.”  
  
“Leonard, I don’t know what to tell you, dear,” says Mrs. Morris, shrugging. “I filled you in on the details when we did the paperwork for the lease.”  
  
“I know,” says the man—Leonard, his name is Leonard, and why’s that name sound so damn familiar? “I know, and I dismissed it because I don’t believe in that shit, ma’am. Pardon my language. But I don’t know what to think any more. Footsteps, noises all night, burnt out light bulbs—”  
  
“Did you like the pie, dear?” asks Mrs. Morris.   
  
“I—yes, thank you,” replies Leonard, caught off guard by the non-sequitur. “It was a nice surprise. Don’t know what brought it on, though.”  
  
“Why, I told you I’d bring it, dear, that day I talked to you about the ghost,” she replies. “Strange, though. Kept insisting your name was Jim. I see you dyed your hair back from the blond. Look better when it's brown.”  
  
Leonard stiffens. “I never talked to you about—you never told me you’d bring a pie, Mrs. Morris. And I've always had brown hair.”  
  
“Shame about that young man,” she continues in an entirely new vein, taking off her glasses and, in a moment of déjà vu, wiping them on the hem of her skirt. “Did I tell you the story, dear?”  
  
“Yes,” says Leonard, sounding strained. He’s looking left and right, now, then over his shoulder, until his gaze wanders up the stairs and he freezes wide-eyed, mouth open, his eyes on Jim. Jim stares right back, his skin crawling with a growing sense of unease; he thinks he knows what’s coming and he doesn’t want to hear it (he doesn’t, he doesn’t, cover your ears cover your ears cover your—) but he still can’t bring himself to move.  
  
“Such a shame,” repeats Mrs. Morris, ignoring Leonard. “This house used to be rooms for rent, before it was renovated. It was such a filthy mess when I bought the place, I tell you.”  
  
“When was that?” whispers Leonard, his eyes still fixed on Jim. It seems like neither of them can look away, neither can move, both stricken to the soul.   
  
“Hm? Oh, gosh, fifteen, no, twenty years ago?” Mrs. Morris replies cheerfully. “Terrible winter. That poor young man. The heating broke. Froze to death in his sleep, they found him curled up in his blankets. I’ll see you later, Leonard. Say hello to Joanna for me.” Mrs. Morris bustles off, leaving them in stunned silence.   
  
There’s a drumming noise inside his head, resonate and pounding, and Jim distantly dismisses it as the blood in his veins, his own stuttering heartbeat, but when he raises his hand to his chest, presses the pads of his wavering fingers to the thin fabric of his t-shirt, there’s nothing.   
  
No warmth, no thrum of blood, no breath in his aching lungs.  
  
Just an echo.   
  
 _Froze to death in his sleep_.  
  
That poor young man.  
  
He dies and dies and dies a thousand times over, alert and aware—  
  
Jim doesn't scream. He takes a deep, shuddering, unnecessary breath. Settles himself. Waves to Leonard at the bottom of the stairs, who waves back, face open and uneasy, and closes his eyes. Feels something bubbling warm and bright inside him that has been missing for so long, chasing away the cold.  
  
 _Relief_.  
  
When Jim finally sleeps, he doesn't dream.


End file.
